She Left Her Village As A Girl, But Never Its Greek Traditions

EXTRAORDINARY LIFE

Each Sunday, ``Extraordinary Life'' looks back on someone who died in the past month whose life made a difference. Mary P. Kamaros of Windsor died Nov. 29, at 103.

When Mary Kamaros arrived in Connecticut nearly a century ago, she was a bride, pregnant with the first of her six daughters. She had grown up in a tiny Greek village on the island of Lesbos, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire since 1462, and knew no one in her adopted country besides her husband.

Born in 1900, Mary Kamaros came from a fairly well-to-do family, as Greek village families went in those days. Her grandfather was an Orthodox priest who also owned several plots of olive trees, and her family lived in one of the nicer white-stucco houses in the village of Ayassos.

When Mary was 19, Stratis Kamaros, who was also from Ayassos, came home to find a wife. He was in his early 30s and had already established himself in America. After serving as a cook in the U.S. Army in the last days of World War I, he became an American citizen and was part-owner of a grocery store next door to the bustling Bigelow-Sanford Carpet Co. in Enfield.

On his return to Lesbos, Stratis Kamaros asked his sisters for help in finding a bride, and he soon met Mary through an intermediary. She saw him in church and pronounced him the tallest and best-looking man she had ever seen. They married within weeks, and the couple stayed on in Ayassos for several months until it was time for Stratis to return to the United States.

By the time they were preparing to leave, Kamaros was pregnant, and her mother urged her to stay and wait until her baby was born. But the young couple sailed for Ellis Island and moved into a cold-water flat over the grocery store in the Thompsonville section of Enfield, where baby Alice was born at home.

Enfield in the early 20th-century had a tight-knit circle of Greek families, and Kamaros soon had many friends -- as well as daughters. Greek families at that time provided generous wedding dowries when their daughters married, and many fathers might have been discouraged by the prospect of six substantial benefits. Nevertheless, Stratis Kamaros always said he was the luckiest man on earth. When his wife told him his sixth child was also a girl, he declared she was as beautiful as all the others.

As the girls entered school, they learned English, and the family slowly added the rhythm of American life to their Greek customs. St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Enfield became the hub of the family's religious and social life.

Mary Kamaros' rules -- about manners, curfews and schoolwork -- were strict. She insisted on repaying a scholarship that her oldest daughter received from her college. Fortunately, the family suffered less during the Depression years than many others because they owned their house and the store, although Stratis' custom of extending credit to his customers made money tighter during the really lean years.

The family was shattered in 1940 when Stratis, then 52, died suddenly, leaving them without means of support. His interest in the grocery store was sold; the oldest daughter quit college and went to work along with her next oldest sister. Iris, the youngest daughter, was barely 3, but some of the other girls could work at the 5 & 10-cent store or pick tobacco in summers and turned their paychecks over to their mother.

Mary Kamaros bought fruits and vegetables by the bushel and canned them herself. For some years, she took the bus to Springfield and used the same sewing skills that had created her hand-embroidered wedding linens to do hand-finishing for a clothing manufacturer.

``We never felt poor [or] underprivileged,'' said Lola Papaioannou, the fifth daughter. ``We'd go and carry things home for women on welfare.''

As much as possible, Kamaros retained her Greek background and traditions: She discouraged too many compliments and carried a blue bead to ward off the evil eye. She taught the girls to speak and write Greek and to embroider and crochet. She prepared Greek specialties, such as spinach-cheese pastries, Easter bread, moussaka and stuffed peppers, but when it came time for the girls to copy her recipes, they realized that Kamaros cooked by instinct, not by teaspoons.

She valued education and sent three of the girls to college, which was unusual for Greek women at that time. She leaves 17 grandchildren and 36 great-grandchildren, of whom one is a pediatric radiologist. (Her oldest daughter, Alice, and a grandchild died earlier.)

In keeping with Greek custom, Kamaros wore only black for years after her husband died, changing her palette slightly only when her first daughter got married. She made time to continue the tradition of the handmade prika, or dowery, for all her daughters, although she no longer wove blankets, as she had for her own hope chest. She crocheted tablecloths and bedspreads for each of the girls, many out of cotton nearly as fine as sewing thread. She made dozens of afghans for family members and friends.